Herrad of Hohenbourg’s Hortus deliciarum has remained, despite the best efforts of a series of scholars since the early nineteenth century, one of the most enigmatic manuscripts of the central Middle Ages. Although it was destroyed in 1870, a casualty of the bombardment of Strasbourg’s Library during the Franco-Prussian war, enough of its contents had already been either traced or edited to give historians and art historians a good impression of the wealth of texts and images generated by the manuscript’s author, Herrad, abbess of Hohenbourg. This evidence was assembled and a reconstruction posited by Rosalie Green, Michael Evans, Christine Bischoff, and Michael Curschmann, published by the Warburg Institute in 1979 in two large-format folio volumes intended to replicate the lavish decoration of the original manuscript, if not its original scale.

Given the mammoth effort involved in simply reconstructing the manuscript’s contents, it is not surprising that earlier generations of scholars made only limited attempts to analyze intentions behind the manuscript’s production, its function, its audience, and its intellectual context. Even its authorship has been attributed to Herrad only with significant reservations, in part because female spirituality of the twelfth century has been defined almost exclusively in terms of the visionary, relying on models such as Hildegard of Bingen and Elizabeth of Schonau. Herrad’s own introductory prologue contributed to doubts about her contribution, as she characterized her work, “like a little bee inspired by God, I collected from the various flowers of sacred Scripture and philosophic writings this book” (85; quoted in Griffiths), a metaphor which, taken at face value, casts Herrad as a mechanical compiler rather than a creative author.

By framing the Hortus within the intellectual climate of scholasticism and monastic reform, and carefully reading both Herrad’s own writings and those she chose for her composite schoolbook, Griffiths succeeds in transforming our understanding of Herrad, and with it our appreciation for the contribution of religious women to the vibrant twelfth-century discourse on the place of learning in the monastery and of male spiritual leadership in female houses. In contrast with other didactic works written for women at the time, such as the South-German Speculum Virginum, the Hortus addresses its audience of women with respect for their intellectual abilities, and assumes their participation in current theological debates. The texts and images of the Hortus lack any reference to the dangers of female sexuality, or the threat women were thought to pose to clerical purity, but instead focus on avarice as the chief sin threatening the contemporary church. Summing up her findings Griffiths states that Herrad’s “example suggests the need for a new model for examining religious women in the twelfth century, one that recognizes women’s deep involvement in the intellectual and spiritual currents of their age” (223). As thorough as it is revelatory, The Garden of Delights significantly adjusts the up-to-now almost universal reading of medieval female spirituality as affective rather than intellectual.

However, to class this as a book on women in the Middle Ages is to do it and its author a disservice. Griffiths rightly points out that there was little in the Hortus tailored specifically to the needs of women. Instead, the book—or more correctly the unbound series of folios, pamphlets, and tipped-in leaves that composed the Hortus—was an almost unique example of a type of schoolbook intended to instruct those who dwelled within monastic walls, men and, it seems, women, using recent literature on many different topics. Structured according to the chronology of salvation history, the Hortus excerpted writings such as Honorius Augustodunensis’s Elucidarium, Rupert of Deutz’s De divinis officiis, and Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Herrad apparently sought to provide her daughter nuns with the most current theological education so that they could make an informed choice of spiritual mentor (81). Her method was both textual and visual: poetry, prose, dialogue, sermons, hymns, and images complemented each other (166). Griffiths once and for all convincingly quashes the suggestion that Herrad relied on a male advisor or scribe for this task, and shows that in all cases Herrad selectively emended, rephrased, combined, and glossed her sources so that they promote a reform agenda throughout. Her selections were learned, and informed by recently drafted reform literature. The images, though for the most part inspired by preexisting artistic traditions, did not simply illustrate the texts, but glossed and amplified them. Thus they, too, were most likely the product of Herrad’s lively intellect.

One of Griffith’s most compelling contributions is on the subject of manuscripts and learning. The Hortus was unbound, most likely a work in progress. Its large format (around 20 inches tall and 14.5 inches wide when closed) “precluded personal use” (167). Instead, it was meant to be read by a group, most likely displayed on a lectern with the nuns gathered around a teacher who explained the texts and images. Griffiths suggests based on the German and Latin glosses that a female teacher, probably Herrad, would have guided the nuns as they sang the hymns, were quizzed on syntax, and absorbed the complex theology offered in the texts and images. Inspired by the scholarship of Mary Carruthers especially, and the work of the twelfth-century Augustinian Hugh of Saint Victor, Griffiths persuasively posits that the vibrant images served as memory aids, intended to deepen the internalization of the manuscript’s material so that it could be applied to the nuns’ spiritual lives. Somewhat confusingly, Griffiths describes both an elementary audience of nuns recently introduced to Latin, for whom Latin glosses accompanying Herrad’s own poetic prologue were intended (177), and others already literate enough to comprehend complex theological lections (184). Would they have been divided into different classes? How did they manipulate such a large, but unbound, sheaf of folios? Griffith’s analysis provokes a variety of questions about monastic education in the age of scholasticism. The author suggests, “From the Hortus, we know not only that women read scholastic and prescholastic texts, but also how they read them” (84). While this was certainly true at the Augustinian nunnery of Hohenbourg, how typical was this house of its contemporaries? What about in Benedictine women’s houses? Because the libraries of female houses, smaller than the libraries of male foundations to begin with, have almost invariably suffered complete destruction, it may be impossible to answer these questions; but the evidence Griffiths gleans from the Hortus provides a striking new perspective on intellectual life within twelfth-century nunneries.

Griffiths assumes a thorough acquaintance with the Hortus, and in her text relies heavily, and probably wisely, on the 1979 reconstruction by Green, et al., seldom describing the illustrations in whole or in series. One wishes that more often she reprised in the main text the justifications for the reconstruction, rather than relegating these explanations to the footnotes, when she includes them at all. The reconstruction was, after all, based on selective transcriptions and tracings made between the early nineteenth century and the Hortus’s destruction in 1870. These scholars inevitably inserted their own biases through the choices they made, but the potential pitfalls of relying on their records are not addressed.

In fact, one must have the two-volume reconstruction available while reading The Garden of Delights because the publishers have chosen to illustrate the book so stingily. Only eighteen black-and-white plates were included, and only thirteen of these illustrate the Hortus. Strangely, Griffiths’s description of a twelfth-century bronze bowl on page 151 does not match that pictured on plate 10. Given that she has only tracings of the original miniatures with which to work, Griffiths judiciously treats the images as texts instead of artworks, and offers no comment on their style or other artistic qualities. Nonetheless, their weight in her interpretation is obvious. She avoids the typical historian’s device of regarding the images as ancillary to or illustrations of the written work. The book also includes a useful appendix with Griffiths’s new translations of several texts original to the Hortus, including those authored by Herrad.

In light of the paucity of its illustrations, one could not call this a handsome volume, but it is rich indeed in insights. Written with such transparency that it can be understood by undergraduates, yet complex in its analysis, the book will take its place alongside the work of Jeffrey Hamburger, Madeline Caviness, Caroline Walker Bynum, and Barbara Newman as essential reading on the theological, intellectual, and artistic life of the nun in the Middle Ages.